JOHN IS CURRENTLY BASED IN THE SOUTH OF ENGLAND working AS A contractor specialising in DESIGN FACILITATion AND SERVICE DESIGn

Jan 5 Provocative design for in-store Luxury Retail

The Challenge

EPAM’s engineering teams have been working with a luxury retailer for a number of years on backend and frontend development tasks. The retailer now has a retained development team, reaching into the hundreds and is considered a growing account. An opportunity arose for a soft-sell meeting between the brand's Head of Digital and ourselves.

As an internal project we had scope to design and deliver a soft sell piece of work to the HoD at our offices in Minsk.

We developed three speculative, deliberately provocative, services which embraced most of the brand's core brand pillars, but contradicted or challenged another commonly held service principal. The intent was to generate conversation without appearing to suggest we knew what the company required without having engaged with them, whilst showing our service design credentials and skills in a much more engaging way than a creds deck.

The conversation was key as this brand had, to this point, never outsourced any form of design.

The design, conversation upon presentation, and follow up work created multiple opportunities for EPAM, and our account with the company is growing as a direct result of the work.

My Role

I was project lead for this project. The team was very small, comprising of myself, an associate designer and with one of our experienced visual designers for a few days towards the end of the project.

I structured and ran the project, helping our new associate learn to iterate on service designs, work through value propositions and conceptualisation and to build complex service maps.

The presentation in Minsk was run by myself, with one of our Directors coming to deliver the "Global Service Design" intro-pitch.